‘For God’s sake! Someone’s emptied the tea pot all over the floor. Look at this — the filthy pigs. Look at it. Clean it up!’
I remember the expression on the constable’s face then. It wasn’t one of sympathy or understanding. It was more a frightened enmity. And I realised for the first time: he thinks I’m mad. I’ve had the automatic in my hand. He thinks I’ve just killed my wife.
I turned to Clare, who was still crouching behind the arm of the sofa, immobile, her eyes firmly shut now, but her thumb still working furiously in her mouth.
‘Tell them,’ I said. ‘About the man who was here, with the gun, who shot Mummy.’
But Clare said nothing. And when I went to pick her up, to hold her in my arms, I found that her body, though quite unharmed, was absolutely rigid. She remained exactly as she had been against the wall, her legs up against her chest, one arm round her ear, thumb in her mouth: frozen solid.
I turned to the policeman. ‘He was here. In the kitchen, a tall man with a stocking mask. This is his gun. I don’t have a gun. Don’t you see?’ He didn’t.
I heard the ambulance coming then and other sirens behind it. The constable came towards me, diffidently, but with ice in his eyes. ‘Now, if you’ll just put the child down,’ he said. ‘Take it easy and come with us.’
I found calm then, out of the blue. I stopped shaking. I realised my own fingerprints were all over the gun now, that the man with gloves on had escaped and that Clare couldn’t speak or move. Laura was dead and I had killed her. What else could they think?
On impulse I put Clare into the man’s arms, edging round towards the door as I did so. As he took her I pushed the little frozen weight into his body so that he stumbled a fraction. Then I ran, out through the kitchen and into the deeper twilight that had come up all round now. I was across the back garden, over the wall into the pasture before I heard the first shouts behind me. But I knew my way here, the old Roman road leading four miles across country to the school, where the police, men from the bright lights of the local town, would be lost in the gathering dark.
Why did I run? To begin with, at least, I had doubts. It was an added admission of guilt. Besides, even though the man had gloves on, the police must surely have been able to find some other evidence of his presence in the cottage: the marks of violence on the door, fibres from his clothes, a footprint obviously not mine in the back garden.
It was the look on the policeman’s face at first: I knew he didn’t believe me. And in that moment I saw the whole thing clearly as a set-up, by British Intelligence, against me. I’d been framed by them once before — and that had taken me to four years in Durham Jail. Now it was my death they wanted. I was sure of that. And so, despite Clare, I had to run.
I hated doing it, leaving her — but my years involved with David Marcus and his various hit-men and ‘persuaders’ had told me, even in that shocked state, that unless I went, they would see me dead in any case, one way or another: a ‘scuffle’ in some local police station, or an ‘accident’ later in the cells beneath Scotland Yard. There were half a dozen ways. I’d witnessed one of them myself: a Soviet agent they’d taken in London once, whom they failed to ‘turn’. They had worked on him with black bags and wind machines — leaving him mindless at that point, with vomit marks running down the back of his jacket. Later they had put him completely out of his misery. And so, that night, I’d run to avoid any similar fate.
I hadn’t regretted it for long. The next morning and during the days afterwards up in the tree, I’d heard the news on the transistor: they never caught any tall man in an ex-army anorak. They were after me from then on, a brutal wife-killer, starting out then on a vast manhunt through the Cotswolds.
Of course, as I saw at once, that suited Marcus’s book just as welclass="underline" they would never find his hit-man, so Marcus could now leave me to the ordinary police, the army, allowing them to think I was no more than the commonest sort of criminal. At best, they would kill me; at worst, Durham Jail would claim me again, but for much longer this time. Either way my ‘memoirs’ would not be continued.
But as I ran that night across the dark countryside I remember thinking: I must tell the truth. I must make these notes, as I have done. Thus, apart from Clare, it’s essential that I survive for the time being, which is the only curb on my anger at the moment. I want to get all these basic facts down before I start looking for Clare and before I see what I can do about Marcus and Ross and the others. ‘What I can do.’ What do I mean by that? I want to do to them what they did to Laura. It’s quite simple.
I made for the school because I knew it would be empty during half-term. I’d decided even then, out on the old Roman road, that this was the best means of survival. I thought of Spinks’s sleeping bag and backpack as I ran; I would lie up in the countryside somehow. I’d friends in London and there were other friends of ours in the immediate neighbourhood. But none of them would be any use. The police would see to that. However, if I moved fast, I thought I could get to the deserted school and then away into the more remote open land on the high wolds beyond, before the police thought of going there. And if I was careful, when they did arrive at the school they wouldn’t find any evidence of my visit there, and might perhaps never know I’d gone to ground in the country further afield. It was Spinks’s backpack after all, which wouldn’t be missed when school started again. And Spinks’s 32-pound fibreglass recurve bow as well. I thought of that, too, as I ran.
But the school wasn’t deserted when I got there, breathless, half an hour later. The housekeeper, seeming now to justify all Spinks’s earlier protests, was entertaining. Lights were on in her rooms down by the garages — and the sports room, next the gym, was just beyond her accommodation. An asphalt driveway led past her windows, which were curtained, but as I tiptoed by I could hear the nature of the party well enough: laughter, music, little shrieks, the tinkle of glass. Of course, it might have been the housekeeper’s sister or her maiden aunt inside, but the smart little Renault by one of the garages suggested otherwise — as did the giggling couple who came towards the sports room when I was inside it ten minutes later, just as I was about to leave with Spinks’s equipment and his bow.
I put my foot sharply against the bottom of the door and the rest of my weight against it — hoping they’d no intention of even trying to open it. Why should they in any case? What could these merrymakers want in the sports room?
They wanted something. A key was thrust into the lock and the handle turned an instant later. I lay against the wood, praying I wouldn’t slip.
A young voice spoke, north country, one I knew. ‘That’s funny. It’s stuck.’ It was Ackland, who took junior science, a vastly bearded, recently qualified, north-country youth who, it was rumoured, actually slept in the lab, so keen was he on his job. But he had some other job in mind now.
‘Won’t be a jiffy. You’ll see.’ He tried the lock again.
‘Come on then! Either in or out. Let’s not hang around.’ The young woman was impatient, bossy, with a slurred, partly cultivated voice I’d not heard before.
‘There’s a sleeping bag in here I’m sure. You could use it,’ Ackland whined, pushing at the door with some desperation now, I felt. One of my feet slipped a fraction. I was damp with sweat.
‘But I’m not staying anyway, I told you,’ the woman said, changing her tune. ‘No more one-night stands, thank you. Let’s go back.’
Ackland, like Spinks, was trying to have it away. I cursed him. If Spinks’s lechery a week before had offered survival, Ackland was now about to ruin me.